Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday October 12, 2011 @11:43AM
from the on-the-third-day-god-created-sigsegv dept.

iONiUM writes "With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry's service be a nail in the coffin? From the article 'The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.'"
This is the same outage as was reported Monday. RIM has released a few details on what's happened: a failed software upgrade brought the system down, and, after repairing the first issue, the backlog of traffic overwhelmed their network infrastructure taking things down a second time.

Relax. What exactly are they saying that's so bad about Canada? Nothing really, nothing specific, just that it's "Canadian technology". It's not like Canada has some kind of reputation for crap technology (in fact, I can't really think of any terrible negative reputation Canada has for anything, except for clubbing baby seals to death, but compared to other countries like America, that's a pretty short list).

If you want to see much more mean-spirited comments (which are completely justified IMO, and prob

Its acceptable and funny to make fun of Canadians, because it makes no sense. You've got a pretty decent economy, health care system, education system, great beer, doughnuts, ect. Its an ironic insult, that is really an insult at one's own nationality. Plus, everyone knows that the best comedians are Canadian, and they've given us a lot of material to work with.

So you'll just have to live with being praised with humour, or you'll have to move to the states.

Seriously though, this couldn't have come at a worse time. Like the summary says, the iPhone 4S is just about to be released, and I imagine a lot of angry Blackberry owners are going to run out and buy one.

Personally though, I'd advice them to think twice and to get an Android phone since I don't think the iPhone reception issues have really been addressed and they'd just be going from one device with reception but no internet access to a device that sports the exact opposite.

A) the antenna design is a slightly altered on that was introduced with the Verizon iPhone. The antenna design is actually very good, you get much better reception with the larger external antenna - the only downside was the gap you could touch to potentially drop a call (if reception was weak), which has been moved to where you can't hit it accidentally. It's also not like you cannot affect signal strength similarly with almost any phone, search for "HTC death grip" and see what I mean. Your meaty hand does a great job of reducing signal strength when you wrap it around any phone tightly.

B) You can opt for Verizon or Sprint for voice service, which have better call quality - but slower data feeds. With the 4s at least you can still roam in GSM countries even if you have Verizon, which is nice. That stopped me from leaving AT&T before.

The annoying thing though, is that you cannot buy an unlocked iPhone to use with anything but a GSM carrier. I was hoping to buy an unlocked hone and try Sprint for a while... so be aware if you wanted to get an unlocked phone for international travel you'll be using AT&T.

Specifically, they've now got two cellular antennas, which allows them to swap to whatever one gets the clearest signal. If you're holding it in your hand, you're covering one antenna (which runs around the base of the phone) but not the other (which runs across the top).

I'll note with some irony that one of Apple's "death grip" comparison videos showed them death-gripping a Droid handset which itself had two antennas. Apple was apparently unaware of this because produced an eyebrow-raisingly implausible de

The annoying thing though, is that you cannot buy an unlocked iPhone to use with anything but a GSM carrier.

That doesn't have anything to do with phone. Sprint and Verizon just won't activate a CDMA-unlocked phone on their networks. It has to be one of their phones for them to activate it. No technical reason for it, just vendor-enforced lock-in. (I use Sprint BTW.)

In all that ranting, you didn't even touch upon why you hate Samsung so much... maybe its common knowledge among Android users (though I don't think so, most seem to really like the Galaxy S from what I hear), but I have no idea what issues you had w/ your Galaxy...

Nearly all of the Android malware comes from third party app stores, most of them in China. There have only been a handful of cases where malicious apps got into the Android Market, and they got removed quickly. I know lots of people with Android phones. I don't know of any of them of who have installed a custom ROM or run a virus scanner, nor of them ever having a malware infection.

Like many software consultants who travel all over the world, I have family and friends on BBM from many different countries.
I have also come to rely on the blackberry for IM and email on the move.
To make things worse, I also bought a BB Playbook which pairs nicely with my BB.
And since it cant do email over wifi, the Playbook has also become essentially unusable for me. I'm on BIS ( not BES )
I would have been fine if I got a text message from ROGERS saying "hey BB service is down we'll be back in 3 da

Yes, it's a good thing to mention that the iPhone 4S is sold out and coming out this week. Because as we all know, iOS 5 doesn't move almost every single existing feature that iOS has onto the iCloud, where similar outages can now affect Apple users.

Nope. Definitely worth mentioning the iPhone 4S, because it totally competes with the Blackberry when it comes to enterprise services and security.

Ehh, apparently you missed a memo or five. iPhones and Android phones have both been able to integrate into corporate networks for quite a while. I have full e-mail, calendaring, and contact sync from the corporate exchange server on my iPhone. We're talking a Fortune 100 multinational here, not "dude the e-mail server guy totally hooked me up with e-mail on my iPhone!" On top of that I can use the VPN server to direct connect to the corporate network and manage my systems from the wifi in the mall if there's an emergency. Maybe a Blackberry can do that too, I don't know, but there's nothing I need to do remotely that I can't do from my phone. I also happen to know for a fact that this is all true for Android too (the guy I replaced uses a Droid something or other and he had the same setup I do). The days when Blackberry could just say "yeah, but we have all the business clients" are long over. They need to compete on features, because business no longer goes to them by default.

iPhones and Android phones have both been able to integrate into corporate networks *RUNNING EXCHANGE* for quite a while

Sure it can, just not as well as a BB. As Microsoft states: iOS 4 ActiveSync issue reflects Apple's priorities. "They don't have a vested interest in the load on an Exchange server... The iPhone is not meant to be an enterprise device

iPhones and Android phones have both been able to *UNSECURELY* integrate into corporate networks for quite a while

This.

Yes, you can use EAS or IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV to get an iOS, Android or WM/WP device to work, but none of them are anywhere near as secure or manageable as BES. For the consumer or light business user, yes, EAS is fine, and geeks can suffer with IMAP+DAV and it's limitations, but as you increase either the number of users or the security and manageability requirements, they don't scale. Anyone who says otherwise has never actually used BES and has no idea what it does.

That said, as soon as someone duplicates what BES can do on iOS, Android and/or WP, BlackBerry is dead to the enterprise. It'll be Symbian all over again, and RIM will be left selling featurephones to teenagers, third-worlders, and third-world teenagers.

There's some question as to whether or not RIM can even port what BES can do to their next-generation devices. The absence of BES manageability hurt the PlayBook's chances in the enterprise more than anything else about it, and the PlayBook runs that same platform. I get the impression that the infrastructure is old, creaky and not all that well understood by RIM's own people.

Yes but your not having to use expensive middleware and are not tied to Microsoft products for services. Also, your mail client is able to use IDL in IMAP for "push email". So it totally doesn't count as "integrating into the existing IT infrastructure".

It doesn't move "almost every single existing feature" onto iCloud. Literally every single iCloud feature is optional. Here's the breakdown:

* Option to do backups to iCloud server.* Apps have access to a Dropbox-style storage space for syncing info across devices.* Rebranding Apple's webmail, contacts, and calendar services to iCloud.* Option to redownload previously purchased iTunes content on the device.

Because as we all know, iOS 5 doesn't move almost every single existing feature that iOS has onto the iCloud

What you do't know is what that means. iCloud is there as a serve to help sync data between devices. You could lose iCloud for 50% of the day and probably not notice, since all of your cloud based data would be eventually synchronized.

Many of the iOS5 features added don't use iCloud at all.

Definitely worth mentioning the iPhone 4S, because it totally competes with the Blackberry when it comes to ent

A company that we contract with is desperately trying to move away from Blackberry because the devices have an incredible amount of difficulty connecting to their enterprise services. iPhones and Android phones have no problem at all.

This is the big difference between iCloud and other cloud servcies. iCloud is primarily a synchronization platform, there's some remote storage but it's meant to always backs local assets, much more like Dropbox than Google Apps. A pure cloud solution would just let you read everything off the remote, but doesn't necessarily make it easy or friendly to maintain local mirrors.

If the servers go down, you lose the ability to sync, but you don't lose what you have.

Seriously, what does the iPhone have to do with a Blackberry outage? No one using a Blackberry is going to switch to the iPhone, because the iPhone doesn't fill the same niche in any way. If you want a phone that can play Angry Birds, get an iPhone.

In the UK, on both outages, RIM has let the mobile networks take full blame for all of the issues - they haven't issued a statement, or let the networks know what to tell customers, with network call centers as much in the dark as the callers themselves.

On Channel4 news (in the UK - report here [channel4.com]) a spokesman said it was a problem with their core switch infrastructure at their primary European site in Slough. Their backup infrastructure was also not functioning correctly either - the problem with the backup infrastructure is unspecified. My first reaction to that is that it must be gathering dust somewhere untested - but it's been on and off for the last three days in the UK so either they have the same problem with the backup infrastructure, they are lying

It's funny how so many people jump all over RIM in a situation like this but completely forget when the east coast earthquake knocked out all the Android and iPhones and BlackBerrys were the only thing working.

Not exactly. Blackberry operates a parallel e-mail system, meaning the typical user has corporate e-mail service via Exchange, with BES connecting Exchange to the world of Blackberry e-mail. An earthquake is a natural event that is addressed in disaster recovery planning. The earth shook, things broke, we get it. When BB has an outage (for whatever reason), people start to wonder why we need the redundant layer of BB service in the first place. Corporate e-mail (e.g. Exchange) is viewed as a necessity, while BES is optional. It is certainly possible to get a smart phone to process e-mail without BES.

I guess it all boils down to how reliable your core e-mail service is. In the companies where I have experience with Exchange coexisting with BES, BES was a nuisance but it almost always worked. We had a lot of downtime with Exchange, so for the most part we appreciated having our Blackberrys work when Exchange didn't. Better admins or a better e-mail server might have made us reconsider the value of BES, since it was an additional point of failure. But in our case it helped more than it hurt.

On the first day of the European outage, I was leaving my office and a student got on at the second floor. She was texting on her phone and I asked her about that, since it was a Blackberry and, as she commented still working in the US. Her reply was illuminating.

Rim made a living off disabling IDL in IMAP and selling it as a middleware product, suing the shit out of people doing the same thing, and gouging customers that use SMS. I don't wish they go out of business. I wish they go out of business and rot in hell.

Seriously, though - using a centralized server does have its selling points, especially to corporations. Unfortunately Blackberry users are currently experiencing the negative aspect of that design decision.

I have a new BB (9900) with OS7 (via. work) and have been completely underwhelmed by it. OS7 is really just OS6.1, and OS6 was more like 5.1, which was more like a 4.8 in real functionality. It feels like Windows 98 with a Windows 7 skin on top of it.

The web browser is a massive improvement, luckily, but I still find myself frustrated by it. Clicking on simple links doesn't work half the time, and I now fondly look back to my browsing experience on my iPhone 3G, a now 3 year old phone, and how it never f

Since this outage started, the Battery life on my Blackberry Bold has been depressingly short.
Today it was flat after just 4 hours...I hope the device isn't repeatedly going out to RIM servers and running up a crazy data bill (with nothing to show for it).
That's the only reason I can think that the battery life would coincidentally drop radically...or...the battery simply failed at the same time as the outage.
- COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

I just had my Verizon FiOS installed today and normally the technician activated the modem using a blackberry. But today he had to call-in and wait about an hour on hold for them to activate the modem remotely. People are comparing Blackberries to iPhones, but Apple iPhones aren't relying on a dedicated network and I don't think there are many businesses that rely on them.

I just had my Verizon FiOS installed today and normally the technician activated the modem using a blackberry. But today he had to call-in and wait about an hour on hold for them to activate the modem remotely. People are comparing Blackberries to iPhones, but Apple iPhones aren't relying on a dedicated network and I don't think there are many businesses that rely on them.

Not quite sure why you bring up the need of a dedicated network as a plus. Since it's just layered on top of the existing cellular/WiFi c

About two years ago our company had a... let's say... rapid shift in IT personnel. The reason for this is not important to the story. Among the personnel we lost were the three admins who knew how the corporate blackberry server worked.

Three days, three hours, and 26 minutes later, the BB server went down hard and stayed down for a week and a half, while unqualified replacements struggled (not very hard, in my opinion) to restore service. (For the first four days they insisted nothing was wrong, and had all of us cycle through endless repetitions of restoring to factory defaults, reentering corporate account info, and other makework.)

Now, it's not for nothing that it's called a crackberry. Blackberry users (of which I was one) rapidly get addicted to the instantaneous gratification that is well implemented push email, and this is what Blackberry classically has done best. It's what they're known for. And when it fails, well, can you say "wholesale panic"??

Personally, I had an Android corporate phone talking to the Exchange server before the BB server went back online. I don't have push email, it's not as nice, but two factors forced the change: (1) I did not know when, if ever, the Blackberry enterprise server would be back online, and (2) I had no confidence in the new IT folks' ability to keep it up. My confidence was shaken. Blackberry as a platform had taken a huge credibility hit.

Now imagine that, only worldwide. They're dead. The very addiction Blackberry has encouraged over the years is now working against them.

Too bad, they make some nice phones. If our BB server had not had its troubles, I might still be carrying one.

Now the only question is, will they migrate to Android, or iPhone?

Like a lot of things, it depends on what you use it for. The non-technical will migrate to iPhone because they don't have to fiddle with it and iPhone has similar "mindshare", similar recognition amongst fellow executives, as Blackberry. The more technical minded, who have gotten used to replaceable battery and storage and regularly use "mass storage mode", don't really have a choice these days other than Android. Windows 7? It is to laugh.

BB server is a lot of overhead when you consider it requires an Exchange server that can just as easily deliver mail to smart phones directly. If we are going to assign IT server responsibilities to a smaller number of less qualified people, things like BB server need to go away and things like Exchange need to be outsourced to cloud vendors.

Also, BB owners shoulda thought of that before buying a phone with a centralized web proxy and messaging!

And Apple / Android owners should have thought about the ability of the government/whoever to eavesdrop on their phone / text messaging before they bought their devices. I choose personal security over an outage every two years any day.

They threaten to ban it because the data center holding the messages is not in their country so they can't just take the messages. Its sitting here, in America (or maybe Europe or Asia depending on where you are geographically). The government in those countries can get at your messages.

America on the other hand CAN get to those messages because the servers are in our country. Guess what, we can also get at the messages of Indian blackberry users to

SMS costs money, and everyone I know has a blackberry, so blackberry messenger was one of the main reasons for buying the phone. I never imagined that they could be so incompetent as to lose mail and IM services for 3 days.

The only reason BBM doesn't cost money is because RIM has deals with the carriers.

BBM is more network-intensive than SMS. A BBM message has to send a few HTTPS packets back and forth, always leaving the network to go to RIM's hosting, while an SMS either piggybacks on control channel packets (using zero extra data, as zeroes would normally be sent in it's place) or sends a more compact, unencrypted lower-level packet with the text in it, depending on the network type.

And that's a bad thing how exactly? Regardless of the means, the end result benefits the consumer and differentiates it from competition... But yeah, they need to fix the damn network, I want my messaging services back.

RIM themselves don't seem to understand what's wrong: the linked article in the Guardian indicates it's a failed database upgrade, but the news earlier was reporting that RIM were blaming a core switch failure.

Anonymous was threatening to "take down the financial companies" on Monday or something like that. Nobody uses RIM except for megacorps which more or less equals the big financial companies.

Sooooo maybe Anonymous did it. Would certainly fit in well with the nothing but spin B S thats been reported so far. You'd think Anon would have taken credit... Maybe they've learned not to do that.

And yet, millions of people disagree with you and have bought these phones. One person's "working better" is another person's junk.

The fact that the pre-orders are sold out means that there are people with different opinions than you. They may also like a different flavor of ice cream or drink a different soda than you. How shocking.

Yes, and his decision was to chuck his iPhone and get a Blackberry. What is your point? That people have different opinions? That's what keeps Slashdot running, things like arkane not liking his iPhone, and having the effrontery to say so.

IMHO blackberries are still superior devices when looked at through the myopic view of being a for-work device. However.. as a "personal" device that occasionally gets used for work I'd prefer an iPhone/Android over a blackberry.

You obviously don't use BES or BBM. BES service is still down, we got notified by our Boxtone service that as of 8am EST we had over 40% of our users with pending messages and it's gone up to near 100% now.

We still have people down. Not sure how many, as I don't deal with phones and many people have switched off BB here already; but I've seen a trickle of people going into the IT guy's office to ask about it.

Ahhh No.It has a much faster dual core CPU, a new radio that supports both GSM and CDMA and a new higher resolution camera, and a new antenna. The only things that didn't change is the screen which a lot of people still think is the best screen on the market, the sensors and frankly I do not know what else they could have added their, and the case.It is very close to a new phone but it is without a shadow of a doubt a much improved version of the 4.

It's been remarkable to see a bunch of otherwise-super-technical slashdotters fall back on criticizing a cellphone's case design. For some reason I thought this was part of the "shiny" "iBling" aspect of a product I was supposed to ignore.

I'll be totally honest with you, I was making assumptions that, since they didn't call it the iPhone 5, that little/no improvements were made.
That, and the only apple dork I talk to wasn't interested in it.

After reading LWATCDR's comment though, I'd like to point out I was wrong.

I would have thought if Apple had changed the form factor slashdot geeks would have complained bitterly how people would have to pay for new cases for a "minor upgrade" ignoring the fact that most people would be upgrading from a 3GS or older would need new cases anyways. Personally I call it an incremental upgrade from the 4 not the major jump from 3GS -> 4 was. But for those on a 3GS, it'll be huge upgrade.